Chicago in the late nineteenth century was the wonder city of the Western world, its famous Loop the laboratory in which to study innovative commercial architecture. There, Old World assumptions were overthrown by New World realities, as the past was discounted, the present glorified, and the future eagerly anticipated.

Visiting Europeans saw the Loop as an urban nucleus built by contemporary realists devoted to the pursuit of profits and a new, functional aesthetic. This futuristic city stunned them, and its crass mercantile class further appalled them: the three-minute lunch, the lightning-fast contract negotiations, the dead-run pace. Visitors also saw and admired what natives took for granted: Chicago's version of the present looked like the future.

They critiqued it extensively in publications in France, Germany, and Great Britain, seeking to understand the causes linking the cloud-scraping office buildings of the Loop, the surrounding bucolic neighborhoods, and the expansive classicism of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago's Jackson Park and their implications for European culture.

An Early Encounter with Tomorrow is the first book-length study of European criticism of 1890s Chicago. Arnold Lewis spent over twenty years researching in libraries abroad and in the U.S. to bring us this comprehensive and unique work. It is extravagantly illustrated with over seventy photographs, drawings, paintings, and contemporary cartoons. An exhaustive bibliography, arranged by country, is appended.